But are they? Really? Very few of them actually seem useful to me as a consumer; though they’re tremendously useful to advertisers and others figuring out how to get us to be better (read: spending more) consumers

Things like expected travel times home or to work are useful, but almost all of the other functions in predictive systems like Google Now and “targeted ads” are terrible and not at all useful. I have yet to actually see a targeted as that isn’t actually just an ad for something I either just bought, or decided against buying. For all the praise reaped upon Google and Facebook’s efforts here, at least for me, the results are garbage, and the loss in privacy is not at all worth the trade off.